Articoli taggati con ‘local development’

This paper focuses mainly on issues related to digital tourism with connection to the italian context, in an attempt to show the potentiality offered by the GIS for the development of the tourism sector.
For this reason, it will be reported exemplifying cases, of which features and purposes will be highlighted. The digitisation represents a new challenge for the tourist offer in Italy. Some studies and proposals promoted by TD Lab (2014) and by the association ItaliaDecide (2014) have highlighted the need for innovation in the italian tourism sector. The digitisation of tourist services therefore offers the opportunity to reaffirm the competitiveness of an industry with enormous potentiality and resources, but that shows signs of criticality and stagnation. Before examining aspects closely related to digital, it will focus on the concept of tourism and its recent developments. The latter in fact, depend on the growing segmentation of demand, pivoted on the search for new experiences and authentic by the tourist. From this perspective it is seen how the tourist promotion is closely connected with the practices of cultural enhancement and marketing strategies, linked to digital communication.

Recently we can see several changes in our society but one of the most important is the transformation of human settlement systems. It is important to consider that for the first time in the history of the human, more than half the world’s population is urban. The megacities are the effect of this […]

This paper aims to underline the need for a “metropolitan governance” in Italy with particular emphasis on the central area of Veneto region. Following on from a recent work by the authors Corò e Dalla Torre (2015) the “metropolitan issue” is analysed on two different levels: the first level of analysis examines the area’s need for metropolitan governance to increase competitiveness with benefits for workers, companies and citizens. The second level of analysis outlines topics which should be taken into consideration by an agenda for metropolitan governance.
1. Introduction: the difficulties of enacting a metropolitan reform
The metropolitan issue is not a new concept in Italy. It has been hotly debated since the 1960s; indeed, the government has proposed laws but all have been systematically neglected. Yet, it is not an insignificant matter: the metropolitan issue is a phenomenon perceived both at academic and administrative level, and above all it is experienced first-hand by workers, entrepreneurs, students and consumers. It is witnessed on a daily basis within an area defined by the network of relationships which go beyond municipalities and regional boundaries.
If the existence of a metropolitan area is a real phenomenon, the implementation of its organisation – at least in Italy – is not rational. The need for metropolitan governance has arisen from the awareness of an increasing inefficiency as a result of the misalignment between the expansion of physical and socio-economic structures on one hand with the expansion of political and institutional structures on the other. This disharmony increases the cost of living for citizens and companies by snatching precious resources allocated to investments and expenditures.
Despite this endless debate, there has always been a conspicuous lack of any actual attempt to implement metropolitan governance. Among the causes of this absence of attempts is the lack of political willingness to change the Italian institutional structure, which involves not only the metropolitan cities but also the wider phenomenon of fragmentation affecting the municipalities in these regions.

In recent years slogans such as ‘festival city’ or ‘city of festivals’ have become common elements of the brand image of many cities. But why have events become so popular? What are the benefits of being ‘eventful’? What is the relationship between city development and cultural events? How do cities create, shape, manage and market events, and how can those events in turn shape the city, its spaces and its image? The creation and promotion of events such as festivals, shows, exhibitions, fairs and championships, have become a critical component of urban development strategy across the globe. No city believes it is too small or too complex to enter the market of planning and producing events, which have become central to processes of urban development and revitalisation, as cultural production becomes a major element of the urban economy. By adding an intangible component to the physical culture of the city, events provide a scenario in which human contacts are possible, however superficial, and there is the promise of communitas through the shared experience of ‘being there’.

One of the most ambitious public works of modern Greece, which is still under development, is the Athens Metro. Such a great project for the biggest city of the country can be viewed and analyzed in many ways in terms of its overall construction. However, its decorative approach seen from an architectural, structural, cultural and artistic point of view is believed to constitute the most important analysis platform of its public aesthetic image. This is why the following article attempts to focus on the ways and reasons of the decorative applications of this practical, public utility work – if any – and discuss their controversial purposes and values.

The two articles featured in this issue of Tafter Journal by Mazuba Kapambwe and Johannis Tsoumas may inspire some further reflections on the difficult, ‘liquid’ relation between place, ideology and politics, which is so present in almost any debate on the role and use of culture in development.
Both papers tell us something of the ways in which culture can serve local development. However, the later is basically about what can go wrong – unimaginative planning abiding hidden interests and business tactics, though the ‘missed opportunity’ from the Athens case is only an arguably minor example of a wider system failure which screams for change and inclusion in decision-making. The former discloses the emergence of a new paradigm, a ray of hope from the plentiful sorrow that plagues the developing world: in the breech of the global cultural economy, social innovation and protagonism has flourished from technology and has reached even the more backwards – but still connected – places.

The paper aims to show how and why network analysis turns to be a precious and complementary tool to evaluate cultural projects for local development. After reviewing the traditional project evaluation techniques, we first discuss how network analysis is able to map a series of aspects characterizing a cultural project and, especially, its sustainability. Second, we show the potentiality of this methodology by applying it to one of the 18 United Nations Joint Programmes in the area “Culture and Development”, implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina.